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Sunday, April 15, 2007

Georgia Tech's offensive line has a perception among GT fans as being one of the elite lines in the country. Is it? Let's take a look.

There are three major responsibilities for the offensive line:- open up running lanes for the ground game- keep the QB's jersey clean- dominate time of possession

A team with a good offensive line is going to do all three of those things well.

So we ranked all 66 BCS teams in three categories that correspond directly to these responsibilities:

Yards per rush - Any team can hand it off 40 times a game and amass yards, but that doesn’t mean the line is opening holes. Yards per carry, however, is a solid indicator of the job an offensive line is doing to clear a path for its ballcarriers.

Negative pass plays - Quarterbacks with poor pass protection are more likely to be sacked. They’re also more likely to be forced into making bad passes – passes that result in interceptions. We count both sacks and INTs as a percentage of total pass plays.

Time of possession - Duh.

What these rankings will look like is the ranking among those three categories one through 66. We'll add up all three to see who had the best o-line in 2006.

Rankings are listed as (yards per carry-time of possession-negative pass play %)

For the record, GT's yards per carry was 4.32 ypc, their time of possession was 29:51 and their percentage of negative pass plays was 9.72%.

Obviously, a bad QB (i.e. Reggie Ball) will take more sacks and throw more interceptions than a good QB, so playing with a bad QB hurts an offensive line's ranking.

Besides looking at 7 of the top 12 teams played in the BCS, was how weak the ACC schools were on the offensive line. Georgia Tech ranked third in the ACC.

One final note, there were only two teams that GT's defense could not stop, Clemson and West Virginia. Clemson had the best O-Line in the ACC (3rd in ypc) and West Virginia was 13th (1st in ypc). If GT's defense couldn't blitz, they would be on their heels.